Lets's discover the men and women who contribute to innovative computer science and mathematics and drive the development of our digital world. The Inria awards also underline the contributions of research and innovation support teams who play a significant part in the efficiency and successes of Inria. All the 2017 awards have been honoured during the Inria 50th birthday event at the CENTQUATRE-PARIS on novembre 7th 2017.

Researchers from the Inria centre in Paris and the Brain and Spine Institute (ICM) have, for the first time, discovered very early and almost invisible cerebral and cognitive alterations in people who it is known will later develop frontotemporal degeneration (FTD) or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). They are the co-authors of an article on the subject in the medical journalJAMA Neurologyof 2 December 2017. A significant advance for therapeutic research.

On the occasion of Inria's 50th anniversary, Qwant and Inria have just signed a strategic research partnership agreement entitled "Smart Search and Privacy". This collaboration takes the form of a joint laboratory, for a duration of four years, focusing on the themes of information searches on the Web, security, programming languages, new data published on the Web, the processing of multimedia resources and the respect of privacy.

A security research team based at Inria center, in Rennes, Brittany, France, Tamis recently partnered with American networking hardware giant Cisco Systems in a move meant to design an innovative method for uncovering malware at code execution.

This partnership agreement, signed by Inria and New York University at this end of year 2017, aims to facilitate collaborations and exchanges between the two institutions. With its 15 establishments spread over six campuses across Manhattan, New York University is the largest, non-profit private university in the country.

The CNIL (French Data Protection Authority) and Inria have awarded the 2017 "privacy protection" prize to a European research team. During the 11th international conference Computers Privacy and Data Protection
(CPDP) to Seda GÜRSES, Carmela TRONCOSO and Claudia DIAZ for their article « Engineering privacy by design reloaded
».

The CCSD (Centre for Direct Scientific Communication) and Software Heritage have announced their collaboration beginning early 2018: it will enable the data repository in HAL to be extended to software and, as a result, contribute to the recognition of the work of research software developers.

Facebook is investing an additional 10 million Euros and doubling the Facebook AI Research (FAIR) team in order to accelerate research on artificial intelligence in France. As a result, Facebook's European hub is strengthening its partnership with Inria.

Facebook is investing an additional 10 million Euros and doubling the Facebook AI Research (FAIR) team in order to accelerate research on artificial intelligence in France. As a result, Facebook's European hub is strengthening its partnership with Inria.

InriaSoft aims for the durable development of large-scale software programs by bringing together their user communities within consortia that will finance a team of engineers tasked with their maintenance and evolution. The InriaSoft headquarters are based in Rennes, as Claude Labit, director, and David Margery, technical director of this national action backed by the Fondation Inria, explain.

Bringing Automated Test Generation to DevOps

A powerful software development methodology, DevOps has become a very popular tool in the US for it greatly helps web giants to deliver more frequent updates. True enough, Europe hasn't catch up yet. Coordinated by Inria, STAMP is a consortium whose aim is to provide a critical missing piece to this methodology. To wit: an automated test generation tool that would make DevOps less risky and incidentally more palatable to European companies. This projet has just been selected as part of the EU H2020 call for proposals ICT-10-2016 ‘Software Technologies’.

Release early, release often. Such is the mantra of Amazon, Twitter, Netflix and the like. These pionneers in the engineering of software applications that run in the cloud now routinely perform hundreds of code updates per day in what has become a thrust of continuous delivery around the clock. This stunning agility turns out to be a decisive competitive edge as it dramatically cuts time-to-market and hikes revenue. Behind the feat lies DevOps: a powerful development methodology that brings high degrees of automation at all steps of construction and deployment.

Whereas DevOps has gained huge traction in the US, the concern is raised that the more conservative European enterprises may be “missing the train
”. For instance, a survey by Rackspace LCC has found that only 40% of UK organizations have adopted this methodology, compared to 66% of their American counterparts. This disinclination is thought to reflect a different cultural attitude toward risk. Indeed, a hasty deployment may propagate a regression bug into production due to lack of sufficient testing. Having this risk very much in mind, developers often prefer adding new portions of code rather than venturing into the hazardous removal of old lines. A perfect recipe for accumulating obsolete chunks of code and thus increasing the so-called technical debt. Fear of breaking things is all the more justified as testing in DevOps mostly relies on manual effort for which, obviously, there is awfully little time given the short development cycles imposed by the continuous delivery.

Test Amplification

And that's where STAMP comes into play. Funded by the EU, this three-year project gathers three academic partners, as well as five software companies and an open source wiki platform. Leveraging advanced research in automatic test generation, “it aims at pushing automation in DevOps one step further through innovative methods of test amplification, says project coordinator and Inria scientist Benoît Baudry. It will reuse existing assets such as test cases, API descriptions and dependency models in order to generate more test cases and test configurations each time the application is updated.
”

STAMP will enhance automatic testing at three different stages in the DevOps process. First: unit testing. “Manually written test cases cover a very small portion of possible behaviors. STAMP will automatically analyze them in order to generate new ones and reduce the time necessary to detect regression bugs.
” Second: configuration testing. “STAMP will generate large quantities of configuration variants and resource conditions, and automatically deploy all of them to test the scalability of a system.
” Third: runtime testing. “The feedback from operations to development provides rich data about the system’s behavior. But this is currently very costly to exploit. STAMP will automate the analysis of production logs in order to improve online testing and re-inject production-level test cases in the continuous testing process.
”

Purposely, these three test amplification techniques will be delivered as independent micro-services. “One will be able to assemble them in order to get continuous amplification, or use them separately and integrate them in different tool chains.
”